I was up in the Lake Tahoe area this weekend and ran across a flyer for a property for sale. This little cabin is near Fallen Leaf Lake, which is a smaller lake at the bottom of a creek the flows out of Tahoe and over some gorgeous waterfalls. The cabin itself is tiny—768 square feet, a single bedroom and a single bathroom—and it does not have a lake view or a garage. It’s at the end of a quarter-mile single-lane road, so that to drive there you have to keep pulling over to let cars by. You can only use it during the summer months because it snows in completely in the winter. It’s on a small, quarter-acre parcel of land.

And yet, as you can see, the sellers are asking almost nine hundred thousand dollars for it.

Why? Note what it says on the flyer: “TRPA Site Assessment Completed,” “Topographic As Built Survey, House Plans.” In other words, this is a tear-down property for almost a million dollars. And that’s because the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency makes it so difficult to get permission to build on your land that even a tiny opportunity like this is valued at an astronomical price.

We often hear law professors and government lawyers claim that the building permit system actually increases your property value—that’s the claim, for example, being made by the City of Flagstaff in our Proposition 207 lawsuit. But obviously it doesn’t increase the value for the people who are prohibited from using their land. What it really does—what the inflated value of this property really represents—is a transfer of property value from those forbidden to build to those allowed to build. This little cabin is like a sponge that has soaked up the property values of other Tahoe area residents—values taken from those residents by the oppressive land use restrictions in the Lake Tahoe area.

And whatever you think about restrictions in the Tahoe area, the fact is that these restrictions do the same thing wherever they are put in place. In ugly urban areas no less than in a pristine wilderness. These restrictions violate property rights by taking away the right to use your property—and thereby drive up the price for the remaining property that still can be used. The results are higher housing prices and a higher cost of living for everyone in society.

This is one of the most outrageous things we've seen: a demand by the city that an owner permanently cede his rights in exchange for a permit.

Officials forget that in a free society, individuals have rights to use and develop their property as they see fit, provided they don't cause harm to others. But officials act as if the government maintains all rights and can simply divvy them up to individuals in exchange for various indulgences.

The Cato Institute's daily podcast today features my discussion of the Griswold v. Carlsbad case. That's the case I argued in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week, and you can read more about it here. You can download the podcast from iTunes or listen to it at Cato's site.

I spoke to Armstrong and Getty on their Northern California radio show this morning about the case of Griswold v. City of Carlsbad. That's the case in which my clients were forced to give up their right to vote in exchange for a building permit. Then I went in and argued the case before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. You can listen to the radio show here, (right-click and "save as"), and you can listen to the oral argument itself here.

Tomorrow I will be arguing the case of Griswold v. City of Carlsbad in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California. This is an astonishing case in which city officials forced the Griswold family to give up their constitutionally protected right to vote in exchange for a building permit. Hard as that might be to believe, it is actually not unique: it's actually quite common for local governments to abuse permits by forcing property owners to give up money or land or other rights.

Amazing as it sounds, there are other similar cases going on right now. In the city of Santa Rosa, California, officials are forcing people to waive their right to vote on the annexation of their property into a local tax district, in exchange for building permits. That voting right is guaranteed by the state's "Mello-Roos Act." And we've heard of similar cases in Montana and elsewhere.

Sadly, local governments frequently force property owners to give up rights in exchange for these kinds of permits. What this means is that the government is essentially confiscating a person's property, and then selling it back to that person in exchange for their rights. Usually, cities demand money in exchange for permits; they also often force people to give up land for a permit. In this case, the city is forcing people to give up a voting right guaranteed by the California Constitution.

More than twenty years ago, Pacific Legal Foundation attorneys won the case of Nollan v. California Coastal Commission before the United States Supreme Court. That decision made clear that a building permit is not some kind of a privilege that the government can sell to you. Permits are supposed to protect the general public against dangerous or burdensome property uses, and government officials should not use them as an opportunity to exploit homeowners and business owners and force them individually to pay for public projects that ought to be paid for by taxpayers in general.

We filed a lawsuit against Carlsbad's absurd policy in 2006, but the trial court dismissed the case, holding that the Griswolds should have sued earlier. We are now on appeal, and oral argument in the case will be heard tomorrow at 9 a.m. Although the argument here is a technical one, the bottom line in the case is clear: government should not be able to abuse the permit process to exploit property owners and take away individual rights.

You're familiar with the frivolous lawsuit filed by Texas developer H. Walker Royall against Carla Main, the author of the excellent book Bulldozed. (The book chronicles an egregious example of eminent domain abuse in which Royall was deeply involved; you can read my review of the book here.) Well, Royall isn't the only one trying to sue critics of eminent domain abuse into silence, in blatant disregard of the First Amendment. Richard Swift and Wayne Wilkinson, public officials in Clarksville, Tennessee, sued critics of a redevelopment project who ran an ad in the local paper criticizing the project. That case has now been thrown out. "Accusing a public official or public figure of using their political influence to obtain a benefit for others or of themselves or favoring their supporters is not defamation," said the judge. "Debate on public issues shall be uninhibited, wide open and generally do include, vehement, caustic and unpleasant attacks on the character of government officials."

The Wall Street Journal has an article here on the problematic "blight" loopholes in many so-called eminent domain "reform" bills. It also carries a clip from Begging for Billionaires, the new documentary on eminent domain abuse that is premiering at the Minneapolis Film Festival this weekend:

Pacific Legal Foundation is proud to have devoted more than a quarter century to the protection of the fundamental human right to own private property. We have fought for that right in state and federal courts across this country, because we believe, as America's founding fathers did, that private property is the guardian of every other right. We do not regard our mission as "quixotic," or as an inevitable failure. On the contrary, at a time when the right of individuals to keep and enjoy the fruits of their labor is under attack like never before in this country, Pacific Legal Foundation is proud to stand as one of the leading champions of this fundamental constitutional right. And we believe that this nation is poised to reaffirm its commitment to the rights of all Americans to work for an honest living, to keep what they earn, and to pursue happiness for themselves and their families. Some may regard this cause as futile or silly. We regard it as our duty as attorneys who have sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States—and as grateful inheritors of a legacy of liberty from previous generations of Americans.